in their beliefs and practices. Faced with Enlightenment challenges to tradition and revealed religion, many Anglican priests and congregants favored a latitudinarian stance in matters of orthodoxy, promoting a rational religion that allowed for broad differences on a variety of doctrines. One historian judged eighteenth-century Anglican sermons as “quiet and prosaic, and always genteel,” appealing to the natural reason of each congregant in persuading him or her to act morally.13 Such a position invited the support of many individuals who were not interested in orthodox doctrine.
This latitudinarianism in matters of faith complemented a pursuit of upward social mobility, as royal governors and government officials favored the church as an official faith. The combination proved irresistible to many ambitious colonists during the latter half of the eighteenth century. Repelled by the fatalism of Calvinist theology and chafing at the demands of strict morality, many merchant families in New England sought a more rationalist faith. Anglican parishes formed in New England’s seaport cities, at the heart of a region traditionally hostile to the Church of England. Local-born Anglican converts ministered to them, encouraged by the famous defection of Yale’s president and four tutors in 1722 from the Congregational to the Anglican Church. In New York, younger Dutch colonists rejected their ethnic heritage for the Anglicans’ expansive vision and English-language services. Second-generation immigrants in German Lutheran and Reformed communities followed the Dutch, as did French Huguenots, whom the Church of England absorbed when Catholic monarchs in France destroyed their mother church.14
A new confidence at midcentury testified to the growth of Anglican influence in the colony. In a study of New York’s colonial-era neighborhoods, historical geographer Nan Rothschild noted that the Anglican churches showed greater growth than those of the Dutch Reformed, and covered a greater population range in the expanding city. Old Trinity already occupied a prestigious spot at the foot of Wall Street on Broadway. Surrounded by three open blocks and commanding a view over the North River, Trinity stood apart from the rest of the city in its own bulk, and in the open space around it. St. George stood on the opposite pole from Trinity, at the higher population densities of the east side on Beekman and Cliff Streets. And St. Paul stood several blocks north of Trinity on Broadway, a stylish landmark of Anglicanism on “what was becoming the most fashionable street in Manhattan.” The Anglican building spree thus reflected two aspects of expansion. Anglicans proliferated in all quarters of the city, surrendering none to their opponents. Second, in building near major thoroughfares, the church “dominat[ed] the prime areas of the city” and claimed a symbolic prestige and importance.15
By the 1760s, Trinity parish stood as the preeminent example of this expansive Anglican vision. At 148 by 72 feet, the church was the largest public building in the British colonies. It housed the first organ built in the American colonies, where fashionable elites could attend elegant concerts.16 The new church attracted the wealthiest New Yorkers, from Anglicized Dutch and Huguenot merchants to prominent British officials. Located at the foot of Wall Street on Broadway, the church stood at a major intersection of commerce.
Figure 1.2. Anglican and Dutch Reformed church locations, circa 1770; the dark line reveals the extent of city settlement around that date. The Anglican churches claim more prominent locations, and are more geographically expansive, revealing greater confidence. (Map created by Alanna Beason, derived from map from United States Census Office, 1886.)
Nurturing universal aspirations, the church also sheltered the city’s poor and lowly. In the 1760s, Trinity became the city’s leading landlord, as its vestry built affordable housing on its land west and north of the city. Many artisans soon resided there.17The Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, which had supplied missionary ministers to New York’s churches since 1701, had also begun evangelization of both Native Americans and African slaves. The British defeat of the Roman Catholic French by 1763, and the subsequent French removal from the continent, seemed to open the continent to missionary expansion. Historian Henry May described such Anglican optimism:
With enough fervor and enough discretion, loyal churchmen could hope for almost anything: a North America all English, all Protestant, united in the same broad and tolerant Church, with even the harshness of slavery mitigated by Christian instruction to both races, with a place for the lowliest and a glorious career for the most talented and devoted, with new worlds to conquer in Africa and India, in an empire united by secular and religious ties.18
But the breadth of the church would prove especially difficult to manage.
Under the umbrella of Anglican evangelization efforts, Methodism stood out as particularly precocious, more energetic, and ultimately longer-lasting than the others. John Wesley founded Methodism as a missionary branch of the Anglican Church, originally analogous to the SPG. Wesley’s Methodists experimented and adapted their methods to reach audiences where the established church had little exposure. In the eighteenth century, that meant success in the heart of a rapidly urbanizing and industrializing England. In these new industrial centers in the North, Midlands, and Southwest, the established church had failed to keep up. But Wesley famously remarked, “I look upon all the world as my parish.” Eventually, Wesley’s followers would take such missionary drive to the Americas, where the established church was present, but not prominent.19
An Oxford graduate, Tory in his politics, Wesley embraced Anglican rites and rituals. But along with his brother Charles, Wesley merged his High Church inclinations with Low Church innovations in worship. Scholars have focused on these innovations, for they came to dominate the story of Methodism in the early American Republic. Among them were small prayer groups and worship services held outside the standard (and state-mandated) times. Also important were hymns, especially the thousands of verses that flowed from Charles’s pen, filled with piety and brimming with emotion. And Methodists styled their preaching to melt the heart, even as John Wesley described his own heart as “strangely warmed” in recounting his conversion experience.20
Such innovations did not make Methodists religious radicals, however. Methodists remained Anglicans until after the Revolution, when the vision of universal evangelization under the established church had tarnished. When John Wesley spoke of primitive Christianity, he did not necessarily mean it the same way early Republic evangelicals later did: as a Holy Spirit–filled ecstasy, ushering in the purity and truth of the early church, free from the corruption of succeeding centuries. Anglicans, like dissenting Protestants, embraced the term “primitive Christianity,” but included with it the presence of bishops and sacramental rituals that had accompanied the Christian church in its first centuries.21 Wesley, who straddled the line between High and Low, embraced this ambiguity. In New York, many of his leading congregants would keep it.
Wesley had little formal influence in the American colonies, at first, but his ideas about the importance of a heartfelt conversion paralleled colonial religious change generally. In the 1740s, evangelist George Whitefield promulgated a form of evangelical Anglicanism that many Americans then deemed Methodist. Whitefield was a master of self-promotion whose revivals drew thousands in the northern colonies, leading to what historians have popularly referred to as a Great Awakening. Although Whitefield was Calvinist, and Wesley Arminian, both emphasized conversion at the center of true religious faith. As Whitefield’s and Wesley’s converts from the British Isles filtered into the colonies in the eighteenth century, some added leaven to the Anglican churches that were growing in the seaport cities.22
These previously unidentified Methodists may have numbered in the hundreds by the 1760s. Over time, some rejected established Anglicanism and worshiped in home churches. The Methodist lay minister and former British military officer Thomas Webb discovered five New Yorkers who had begun worshiping at home in 1766. Webb introduced them to other coreligionists, and encouraged the fledgling group to acquire a house of worship. These early New York Methodists moved to a rigging loft on William Street in 1767. The next year they raised four hundred pounds
